Re: Yiddish music

[Jennifer R. Goodman <jenifer...>]

Katie - 

Thanks for your message; I'm glad the suggestions seemed 
helpful; I'm starting from the ground up, myself, and thought
I had a lot of nerve offering them in the first place!

In answer to your questions: 1) I haven't heard Shalom, so I
can't compare the two, but to my ear the Yiddish Dream sound
quality is quite reasonable -- the singers are Jan Peerce,
Herschel Bernardi, Shoshana Damari, Netania Davrath, Leon Lishner,
Martha Schlamme. It's certainly all in Yiddish, and mostly 
standard pieces; five of the 22 are American.

2) Yes, there are a lot of albums with both klezmer and Yiddish
vocal music; in fact, I think most klezmer groups I've heard
try to include some Yiddish songs as well as instrumental pieces.
For your purpose a "straight-ahead" klezmer band of a fairly
traditional type would probably be better than the latest
cutting-edge group. You can find good descriptions of bands of
all sorts, with reviews of recordings, on Ari's Klezmer pages
on the Web. (Have sixteen other people already told you that,
including Ari himself?) My thinking here is that earlier or
more traditional klezmer recordings will come closer to the original
Eastern European music, before it became intertwined with jazz.

3) Someone of greater authority may want to correct me, but my
impression of Tzimmes is that they sing all sorts of Jewish music.
Some of it is traditionally Yiddish, and some isn't.

Good luck with the project; let me know how it goes! 
If I can help you further, please let me know. I'm delighted that
you are doing this; the music is wonderful, and not enough people
know it exists. 

All good wishes,

Jennifer